EveryTime is a forum app for the university community, developed by the students from the department of statistics at Sungkyunkwan University. Released in the early 2000s, EveryTime has grown to become a popular mobile phone application, already installed on 3.6 million students' phones. Unlike other community platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, Everytime's users can create forums according to their preference. For example, there are games forum, solitary forum, pet forum, et many others. Especially, users can get the news from our university and about their own major as soon as possible, through 'HOT notice forum', and 'BEST notice forum'. They have already received from 10 to 100 recommendations. Users can easily lay, especially important these days as we cannot go to school because of COVID-19. Through EveryTime, students can send complaints and suggestion for improvement to the university student council via an 'anonymity' function. So, Everytime is an essential application for freshmen.
However, does Everytime have the right functions? There have been many adverse effects like slanders, making fun of others, fake trades, and dirty jokes. There are Free notice forums that attract many Freshmen. They feature some bad posts. For example, one write: “One student is taking the class during driving, it is so clueless” or “I hate students who answered every professor's questions”. These examples are uncalled for snipes at people. Also, some of these forums have posts criticizing the minorities, like “Feminists are disgusted.” or “I can't understand sexual minority”. If concerned students read these posts, they may lose interest in life and can't adapt to school.
Additionally, there are fake trades notices in 'marketplace’ notice forums. We can see many post where someone promises to trade, but doesn’t show up for the appointment or doesn’t send the traded objects. Students who are victims post messages like “I am very angry. I was waiting at the appointment place for 2 hours”. Fake trades are destroying the credibility among Hannam university students. And slanderous and violent posts convey to students a bad image of their university.
Another questionable use of the app concerns the posting of dirty jokes' on '19 forum'. Our university's forum name is '19 story for adults'. There are many unpleasant posts. For example, “Who will meeting me today?” or users are posting pictures of their specific body parts. Because of these actions, the ‘19 forum’ is often taken down, but someone set up another 19 forum by just changing the name. Dirty jokes are not just a problem of making other users uncomfortable. These EveryTime actions can carry over to internet sexual assault like 'N number room'. If our university's students write sexual posts without any sense of responsibility, they will want more sexual pleasure and stimulation. What about attackers in 'N number room'? They may not know that teasing and threatening girls behind the Internet anonymity, for their pleasure, is illegal. In other universities, EveryTime users have posted many 'secondary damages' about N number room's victims. So, on April 7, the university's women organizations have called for setting up ethical guidelines for the EveryTime system, including notification and deletion.' But, EveryTime didn't implement a technical solution with preventive measures about internet sexual assault or expressing disgust about some posts.
EveryTime gave a numbers of anonymous tips to prevent writing too many comments and solve many adverse effects. But, this notification system is only a temporary expedient like 'suspension of use for three days, one week, one month, or three months.' Also, Everytime argues it take no responsibility for secondary damages in ‘N number room’ that express disgust of women. As you can see from the example, Everytime has no legal powerful to punish every objectionable posts.
While Everytime features many positive functions, they are negatively affected by slanders and fake trades. Despite these EveryTime is improving. If our university's Everytime platform has more positive functions, students must respond with attitudes of self-examination. And if students strive to create a better environment, the university campus will be a beautiful place to grow.
